I don't doubt the trends that are being reported. As I said, I dispute the narrative being fit to the data:
> Samantha Brandauer, who runs Dickinson College’s study-abroad office, told me she has experienced this firsthand. In her past job at Gettysburg College, she teamed up with a colleague to convene student focus groups on why men didn’t go abroad and what the college could do about it. What she discovered was a “bro mentality” among men in college—a culture in which male students don’t want to leave their friends to study abroad and are heavily influenced by their classmates in making choices about what to do in college. “Part of this is a messaging problem, because the way we talk about study abroad as a transformative experience just doesn’t resonate with college-age men,” Brandauer says. “They don’t want to be transformed.”
I may have missed something in my reading, but to my eye this is the only explanation offered for this trend in this article. And in my estimation, this is a lazy explanation that fits a political narrative a little too easily.
And yes, I am hiding behind a thowaway account, but I’m not complaining about treatment of me or people like me. This is a trend I’ve noticed in articles that blur the boundary between editorial and reporting, and I don’t think it is fair to anyone.
I find myself kind of scratching my head at some of the news stories about gender differences these days, and how there always seems to be a spin that casts males in a negative light.
Fewer male students study abroad? It’s that are lazy.
Girls are much harder working and get better grades in school, but lose out in the office because they don’t know how to skate through with minimal effort the ways boys are taught to do.
I mean, can we seriously discuss gender outcomes that don’t reduce to:
- when males are on the losing end, it’s because they are inferior in some way
- when women are on the losing end, it’s because they have been set up to fail.
Sadly, any real discussion of the narrative bias gets you branded a “men’s rights” activist and dismissed as a crank.
> Samantha Brandauer, who runs Dickinson College’s study-abroad office, told me she has experienced this firsthand. In her past job at Gettysburg College, she teamed up with a colleague to convene student focus groups on why men didn’t go abroad and what the college could do about it. What she discovered was a “bro mentality” among men in college—a culture in which male students don’t want to leave their friends to study abroad and are heavily influenced by their classmates in making choices about what to do in college. “Part of this is a messaging problem, because the way we talk about study abroad as a transformative experience just doesn’t resonate with college-age men,” Brandauer says. “They don’t want to be transformed.”
I may have missed something in my reading, but to my eye this is the only explanation offered for this trend in this article. And in my estimation, this is a lazy explanation that fits a political narrative a little too easily.
And yes, I am hiding behind a thowaway account, but I’m not complaining about treatment of me or people like me. This is a trend I’ve noticed in articles that blur the boundary between editorial and reporting, and I don’t think it is fair to anyone.